Covering Crime in Washington, D.C.: Examining the Nature of Local Television News Coverage of Crime and its Effect on Emotional Response

Abstract

This paper examines the nature of local television news coverage of crime and its effects on emotional response. Specifically, I present the results of a content analysis of two months of local television news coverage of crime from a network affiliate in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Consistent with what others have found regarding local television news, I find that most local news crime stories are episodic in nature and focus on violent crime, particularly murder. Moreover, there is a specific racial cast to this coverage – significant attention is given to black perpetrators while black victims are under-covered. Using an experiment that compared two types of crime stories taken from the content analysis to explore how coverage influences viewers’ emotional reactions, I find, contrary to my expectation, that a thematic story about violent crime generates greater and more varied emotional response than an episodic story dealing with a specific murder. When I vary the race of the perpetrator portrayed in the episodic story to try to examine the influence of the prevalence of visuals of black perpetrators in the crime coverage, I do not find differences in how participants in this study respond to the murder story based on the race of the perpetrator. I discuss the implications of my findings and suggest future directions for this research.